Internet Gurus Guide to Internet Relay Chat: Introduction

For readers of The Internet For Dummies,
here's information about how to use Internet Relay Chat, the original real-time Internet chat system.
If you'd like to read a book about online community, including how to participate in and
set up your own online chat channels on IRC, read Poor Richard's Building Online Communities (by us).

Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is, in theory, a way for individuals
around the world to have stimulating, fascinating, online
discussions. In reality, IRC is more often a way for bored
undergraduates to waste time. More than any other Internet service,
IRC is what you make it. If you can find interesting people to have
interesting discussions with, IRC is wonderful. If not, kiss your free
time good-bye or stay away from IRC.

Like every other Internet service, IRC has client programs and server
programs. The client is, as usual, the program you run on your local
machine (or perhaps on your provider's system) that you type at
directly. An IRC server resembles a large switchboard, receiving
everything you type and sending your messages to other users and vice
versa. What's more, all the different servers are in constant contact
with each other. As a result, stuff you type at one server is relayed
to the other servers so that the entire IRC world is one big, chatty
family. In this chapter, we call the IRC client your IRC program
because you don't run an IRC server program.

To add a degree of coherence, IRC conversations are organized into
channels, with each channel dedicated to a single topic, at least in
theory. Because any user can create a channel, you get some funky ones
(not to mention downright dirty).

The Theory of Chatting

You can use lots of different client programs for IRC that run on lots
of different kinds of computers. Fortunately, however, the steps to
use the different client programs are practically identical:

Establish contact with an IRC server.

Tell the server who you are.

Join a couple of channels.

Waste lots of time.

Networks, Servers, and Other Things You Don't Want to Know about

If you're at a university or use a commercial Internet provider, a
server is probably at or near your site. Users at The World, for
example, a Boston Internet provider, use an IRC server The World
provides. Use a local server, if available, because using a local
server is the polite thing to do and because it probably will respond
faster than a server farther away.

Networks of servers

IRC servers are organized into networks of servers that talk to each
other. Here's a list of the three biggest networks, in order of number
of users, and their Web pages:

All EFnet IRC servers are connected to each other, all Undernet
servers are connected, and all DALnet servers are connected. All the
folks on EFnet can talk to each other regardless of which EFnet server
they connect to. Servers on one IRC network don't connect to servers
on other networks. Someone on EFnet can't talk to someone on Undernet,
for example. When you choose a network, you choose the universe of
people you'll be hanging out with on IRC. After you have spent some
time on IRC, you probably will develop a preference for one network --
the one where your friends hang out.

Lots of smaller IRC networks exist. Here are some, with the
addresses of Web pages that have more information about them:

Choosing your server

Which server should you use? If your Internet provider runs an IRC
server, use it. If you're sure that no local server is available, you
can try one of the IRC servers in our Internet Gurus Central List of IRC Servers. Use the server closest
to you. Because servers come and go frequently, be sure to consult the
Usenet group alt.irc for more complete and up-to-date lists. When you
connect to an IRC server, you specify the port, which is a
number. Unless it's specified otherwise, use port 6667 on any IRC
servers. (You see in a minute where to tell your IRC program which
port to use.)

What if you can't get in?

Frequently (most of the time, some days), when you try to connect to a
server, you can't get in. Instead, you see an error message, such as
"No Authorization" or "You have been K-lined." These messages mean
that the IRC server is full or that too many people from your
particular Internet provider are connected now or have been connecting
frequently in the past. When this happens, just try another server.